Red Headed Femme

 Saw this on my walk today. 








This is (I believe) a greater roadrunner, or Geococcyx californianus. 

(Took the picture with my Galaxy Note 5 and cropped it with Google Photo. It didn't turn out half bad.)

Seen on my walk today. Even the cacti are feeling good. (Description: Cacti in gravelled front yard with fuschia flowers.)

Review: "Permafrost," by Alastair Reynolds



I think time travel stories are among the hardest to write well, simply because it's all too easy to get bogged down in illogical paradox loopiness. This is among the better ones I've read recently, and it's definitely not perfect. Mainly because the global event that sets it off, if you stop to think about it, is so grim and hopeless I wondered why these people were even bothering. (And also because I highly doubt the event as described would cause such a shattering planetwide catastrophe in such a short period of time. Even the end-Permian extinction, the most severe of Earth's five major extinction events, took place, at a minimum, over hundreds of thousands of years.) I'm sure a great many of them would have just quietly committed suicide rather than face the struggle of trying to live on a planet scoured of nearly all life.

That's neither here nor there, I suppose, although it shows you can't ponder this novella's worldbuilding very much. This definitely gets a one-star dinging from me. On the plus side, the time travel mechanism seems fresh--at least I don't remember reading a mechanism quite like it (although I'm sure there has been). These time travelers are not the people themselves, but rather their consciousness, moving up and down the time stream. There's a lot of high-level quantum physics in this book. The author makes a decent stab at explaining it, but after a while I just substituted the words "Luba Pairs" with "woo-woo," because that was about how well I understood it, and thought, "Just get on with the story."

In this case, the story has to be paid close attention to. The structure of this novella is very much like the time travel shenanigans the author is describing--definitely non-linear, bouncing back and forth between 2028 and 2080, doubling and tripling back on itself. As we come to find out, the time stream can be manipulated, and indeed the protagonist ends up being forced to do so. This contributes to the feel of the story's being rushed; indeed, there are almost too many ideas and concepts here for a novella length. The mission starts to come apart as time paradox creeps in, and one incident in particular, about the middle of the book, gives the reader a horrifying jolt that snaps you back to the very beginning, making you re-evaluate the story. As it was meant to.

I liked this well enough, but I would have liked to spend more time with the two main characters, Valentina and Tatiana. I also would have liked the overall situation to not be quite so hopeless, which no doubt contributed to the rather abrupt ending, as the author seemed to have written himself into a corner. This was readable and interesting, but flawed.

Review: "Storm of Locusts," by Rebecca Roanhorse



This is the sequel to last year's Trail of Lightning, and in reading this book, you can clearly see Roanhorse's improvement as a writer. The prose is smoother, the pacing better, the characterizations sharper. The protagonist in particular shows notable character development. In the first book, Maggie was a broken, depressed, bad-tempered misanthrope struggling with PTSD who trusted no one and just wanted to be left alone to kill as many monsters as possible. In this book, she has made up her mind to try not to kill, and she is slowly learning to open up, to trust, and ask for and accept help. She begins to assemble her own little collection of friends and allies, people who have her back, and it's gratifying to watch.

This book also opens up the world, as Maggie's quest takes her beyond the borders of her magical land of Dinetah. After the Big Water, the author's name for her future climate change apocalypse and governmental collapse, the outside world is rather reminiscent of the lawless Australian outback of Mad Max: Fury Road. The villain this time around is the creepy and shudder-inducing White Locust, and if you have any kind of phobia about insects, let me assure you this book will not give you a restful sleep.

New characters this time around include Ben, a sixteen-year-old girl just come into her clan powers who Maggie sort-of reluctantly adopts. Ben is adorable, and I hope we see more of her going forward. The book ends with the White Locust defeated and this particular storyline wrapped up, but there is a coda involving the villain of the first book that promises all sorts of trouble for Maggie in the next. Given the steps forward taken by the author in this book, I'm looking forward to it.

 

This is an Arabic-inspired fantasy, beginning in eighteenth-century Cairo (that's from the jacket flap; there's no specific year mentioned), and ending in the secret magical land of the daeva, or djinn. In between we have a rather complicated and fast-moving plot of rebellion, betrayal, oppression, and court intrigue, with a con artist protagonist who is much more than she seems. 

The October Daye series is a good example of an author's evolution, and giving the author room and time to improve. The first book, Rosemary and Rue, released in 2009 at the start of the urban fantasy craze, is serviceable enough, and perfectly adequate. It is not outstanding. But keep reading the series, and you can trace the author's improvement in craft, prose, characterization and plotting. One of the greatest pleasures in reading this series, in fact, is how the seeds carefully planted in the earlier books spring to surprising and/or noxious life in the later ones.

The main character has changed a lot over the course of the series. Toby once wanted to be human, or as human as possible for a part-Fae changeling; now she embraces her Fae blood and powers. (Although if I were her, I would magick up some way to carry bags of replacement blood with me wherever I went, as she seems to lose gallons of it over the course of a book.) She once prided herself on needing no one, rejecting help, and pushing other people away; now she has a painstakingly built found family she is fiercely loyal to and will fight to maintain. She has even developed a friendship with her terrifying aunt, the Luidaeg (who is one of my favorite characters).

As Toby's character has deepened and expanded, so has the author's world. This book takes her into the depths of Faerie and brings her face to face with the older half-sister she never knew. It also reunites her with the person who betrayed her, Simon Torquill, who gets an affecting character arc of his own. There is a lot of trauma in this book, realistically portrayed, and it doesn't exactly end on a hopeful note.

(I also appreciated the inclusion of a side novella at the end, exploring a different character. This story, "Of Things Unknown," is an interesting blend of Faerie and cyberpunk.)

This is book number 11 of the series; as of right now, two books remain. I think McGuire is lining everything up and getting her ducks in a row for the finale. I'm looking forward to it.




This book follows on the heels of book #11, The Brightest Fell, and deals with the consequences and fallout of the events in that book. As a matter of fact, you could sum up the entire October Daye series with those two words: "consequences" and "fallout." It's rather refreshing to read a story that takes everything that has occurred previously into account, and demonstrates that these characters have to pay the piper. (It must be hellishly difficult for the author to keep everything straight, but I think Seanan McGuire is doing an admirable job.) There is a revelation in this book that upends pretty much everything that has gone before, and I presume the next book will deal with this. The extra side novella included, "Suffer a Sea-Change," tells the story of the climax of this book from another POV, and is a fascinating coda. I also appreciate that the characters are not recovering quickly from the events of the previous book, and in fact Toby's fiance Tybalt is suffering from a form of PTSD and has to take time away from his kingly duties to heal. To let a male character be vulnerable, and admit to needing help, just shows the author's increasing skill with her characters, and the depths of their characterization. "Suffer a Sea-Change" also gives us some nice insights into the Luidaeg. On the whole, this is a very satisfying story.

 

This book is a sort-of sequel to Seraphina and Shadow Scale, which introduced the country of Goredd and its dragon/human conflict. Tess Dombegh, the protagonist of this book, is the younger half sister of Seraphina, the half dragon/human who averted a war in the two earlier books. This book does not have stakes anywhere near that; it is the story of Tess's journey, both on the literal road and within, as she works through some PTSD and finds her own strength and sense of self-worth. 

 

I'm a fairly serious reader of SFF (science fiction and fantasy). I haven't read all the classics, nor all the SFF published today; that's impossible. But I don't often run across a science fiction novel that I could properly describe as "warm, fuzzy and plotless." This book is exactly that.

(Note: R.F. Kuang has been nominated for the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer. This is famously "not a Hugo," but it will be presented at the awards ceremony.)

I've heard a lot about this book. It's been nominated for several other awards, and even won a few. I've heard how intense it is, and how the author pulls no punches when it comes to her depiction of war, and how many content warnings it needs (all of them)...and I'm here to say that all of that is true.

But damn, this is one of the best books you'll read this year.

First and foremost, this is a story about war, and yes, it is bloody and gory and not for the squeamish. (Just as one example, if you want to know exactly what happens when you thrust your sword under someone's chin, the author will provide a detailed description.) But more than the physical aspects of war, this book tackles the psychological aspects. Specifically, how war slowly but surely drains away one's humanity, and makes a soldier into someone who sees the enemy not as a fellow human being who is fighting for the same reasons you are, but as an animal to be hated and destroyed, and finally, simply, as a number in your way to be subtracted. The protagonist, Fang Runin, undergoes this journey, and emerges as (as she says at the book's end):

I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible.

Was she now a goddess or a monster?

Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.

This book breaks down what leads Runin (or Rin) to this place. It's a result of war, a reaction to the Federation invading her country of Nikan, but it also comes about due to her desire for power and revenge. She has a great deal to want revenge for, as it turns out. The depiction of the Federation destruction of a Nikara city and the wholesale slaughter of its entire population is a harrowing, sickening moment that I will warn you requires a lot of spoons to read. Multiple spoons. An entire drawerful of spoons. Even so, I wouldn't blame you if you set the book aside once you get to that point and never pick it up again. But Rin pushes on, and does something even worse in return, invoking the power of the supernatural entities she learns to partner with and control during the course of the book. It's a hideous game of one-upmanship, and the ending promises it will not stop there.

But because the author so convincingly strips Rin down to nothing but her hatred and obsession, it's as dark and compelling a character study as I've ever seen, and this is what kept me reading. There is no way out for these people, and their choices only make things worse. If you can't handle that kind of thing, it's best you don't even start this book. Because as bleak and relentlessly grimdark as it is from beginning to end, the author writes it with such skill you can't put it down. And dammitall, I'm going to pick up the sequel as soon as it comes out.

If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side. ~Juan Antonio Bayona

For nearly the first half of this book, I thought there had been a Singular Logic and Plotting Fail, and I was grumbling to myself as I read. "Why is the protagonist still there? Why is she putting up with this nonsense? Is this some sort of weird Faerie Stockholm Syndrome, or what?"

But as the story, and more importantly, the characterization, continued to unfold, it dawned on me why, indeed. At the turning point of the book, I realized how carefully the author had planned her story. Given what happened and what was revealed, there was nowhere else the story could have gone, and my opinion of it did a 180-degree turnaround.

That, my friends, is some master class writing.

This is a dark, bloody tale from the get-go, with a Faerie that is the furthest thing from warm and fuzzy, or Tinkerbell-cute and treacly. These Fae, for the most part, are beautiful, charming, cruel, murderous sociopaths, and the author pulls no punches with them. None of the characters are likable, including the protagonist, but they are damned compelling, and not in a train-wreck sort of way, either. I suppose this book could be likened to a Faerie version of The Sopranos. We may think Tony is a monster...but we can't keep our eyes off him.

The book opens with a scene that sets the tone for the entire story: three young girls on a typical suburban morning, eating fish sticks and ketchup and watching TV while their parents work in the house. The doorbell rings and our protagonist, seven-year-old Jude, gets up to answer it. There is a man with greenish skin, pointed ears, and a long black coat she has never seen before, and his eyes are the same as her older sister Vivienne, vertical cat slits. The mother comes to the door, and the dialogue that follows establishes that Jude's mother was this person's (not a human) wife; and years ago, while pregnant with Vivi, she faked her death and fled. The situation escalates quickly, and the stranger kills the childrens' parents and kidnaps all three children to Faerieland.

Ten years later, our story opens with a grown-up Jude and her twin sister Taryn, living with Vivienne and her father, the redcap Fae Madoc, who is general to the King of Faerie. Madoc's position means the girls are given the same privileges as children of the Gentry, even though they are resented and persecuted (bullying is too mild a term for what Jude and her sister are subjected to--the torment borders on sadistic). Jude is concentrating on surviving and trying to earn some sort of place for herself at court.

All well and good. At least until I learned that Jude and her sister are not locked into Faerieland (or Elfhame, as it is called here); Vivi crosses back and forth between Elfhame and the "mortal world" fairly often, even taking Jude and Taryn on visits to the mall. When I read that, it about wrenched me out of the story. I thought, what the hell? Why are Jude and Taryn, or at least Jude, still in the land of Faerie, after being kidnapped and living with their parents' murderer? But I kept reading, and the reason soon became clear: Ten years of living in Faerieland has made Jude almost as ruthless, scheming and murderous as the redcap who raised her. There is no way she would be able to fit into the human world.

This is what I mean when I say the characters are not likable. The body count is high, and the manipulating and backstabbing is epic. The elder brother of Cardan, the titular "Cruel Prince," assassinates nearly his entire family in his attempt to gain the throne, and Cardan, who is introduced to us by way of his torment of Jude and Taryn, is no prize himself. But the author has cleverly cast her characters to draw the reader in regardless, and given them just enough whiffs of a peculiar and twisted kind of "honor" to keep us from turning away in disgust. In the end, Jude plays her game to its end and puts Cardan on the throne, and ends up becoming the shadow-ruler of Elfhame behind him.

The book ends there, as the epitome of the phrase, "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." This story is as cruel as its characters, and we will definitely not receive any kind of happy ending. But the writing is powerful, and I will be reading the sequel.